No pressure or anything, you poor child who has been through enough trauma for a lifetime!! She can’t help herself but ask him the question she’s been mulling over: What if he’s wrong? What if she isn’t one of the good guys? He tells her about people like Sullivan who think she is the curse, but he is sure, “willing to bet the fate of the planet” sure, that she is the cure. And, of course, there is the added bonus that if this program doesn’t work, she might never see those people again. She can’t head out to Hawkins to help them first. Of course, there’s a catch: She has to leave with him now. He’s built a program that he believes is a way to get Eleven’s powers back and a way to make her stronger than she was before. She hears him but has one small concern: Her powers are gone. And after looking at the photos Sullivan showed him, he believes that only Eleven can stop the evil, which is getting smarter and stronger, that’s plaguing Hawkins. At a roadside diner, Owens tells Eleven that Hawkins and her friends are in trouble. Owens has been hanging out with his family in Ruth, Nevada, since getting fired from his Hawkins post, but when he gets a visit from Sullivan - who makes it clear that he’s going to do whatever he can to find and stop El - Owens springs into action. Is that naïve? I’m well aware that if I were in the world of Stranger Things, I would be killed off within the first episode. Owens! There’s just something about the way Paul Reiser says “hey, kiddo” that makes me trust him immediately. There’s just enough time for you to wonder if it’s actually Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan, who blames El for everything that’s gone on in Hawkins’s past and present, but that’s just for drama, baby. Without Joyce around, she’s on her own, and her questioning goes about as well as you’d expect.īut wait! There’s hope! The van taking El to a juvenile detention center gets stopped by three unmarked cars. Not like El and Mike have time to talk it out anyway: The cops arrive and they’re arresting El for assault. But adolescence - and that flashback she keeps having to a very monstrous deed - is much more complicated than that. Maybe she thought that without her powers, that feeling would go away, too. And it certainly doesn’t help that he’s been signing all of his letters to her “from, Mike” instead of “love, Mike.” Has a valediction ever been so heart-wrenching?Įleven has always had it in the back of her mind that she’s a monster just like the ones she’s saved Hawkins from - that she is linked to the Upside Down on more than one level.

She saw the way he looked at her at the rink. Mike’s attempts to tell her that she’s incredible, that she’s a superhero, fail. Mike could never understand how she feels even though, yes, as he reminds her, he’s been bullied his whole life - but the difference, she responds, is that she actually is different. El won’t leave her room the next day (not even for waffles!), and when Mike finally goes to talk to her, it escalates into an argument that’s less about Eleven slamming a girl in the head with a roller skate and more about something she has been grappling with since the day we met her. One question, Joyce!Īlas, she does not ask anything about it before heading out to the airport. Or why Eleven storms off from the table when Mike comments on it.

She asked so many questions about magnets last season all I’m asking for is one follow-up about the vague mention of a roller skate attack. Obviously Joyce is distracted with her impending rescue mission, but maybe she should, I don’t know, ask just a few more questions about the weird tension at the dinner table. Well, Jonathan and Argyle have a lot to say, but they’re pretty high, so none of it is helpful. No one has much to say when the group in Lenora Hills returns home from the roller rink. I know the man is very busy, what with having someone break the bones in his feet so that he can slip off his chains and be ready when it is time to escape his Soviet prison, but come on, dude, hurry up - Eleven is in some big trouble and only has an unlikely and possibly not-so-altruistic blast from the past able to help her. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/Courtesy of Netflix

Strager things 3